“I anticipated giving an entirely different lecture today,” Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, told a standing-room-only crowd at the University of Chicago Law School yesterday. “I was hoping to tell you that America was entering a new era of reproductive rights defined by possibility and progress. But the rug was pulled out from underneath us. The future of reproductive rights is more fragile than at any moment in my lifetime.”
It was largely a positive talk to a receptive crowd. (There were three protesters standing outside the law school bearing larger-than-life photos of aborted fetuses with the message, “Cecile Richards: What about his future?”) Richards spoke with passion and energy and skillfully pivoted questions back to her main talking points. She emphasized the necessity of being prepared for a long, hard battle, a battle in which everyone should participate, especially on the local level, where she anticipated it would be easiest to accomplish change. She insisted that healthcare was not, as she put it, a “siloed” issue, but one that intersected with civil and economic rights. She encouraged her audience not to waste time on worrying, but instead get to work.
